


Sweetness

by frankenbolt



Category: Drop Dead Fred (1991)
Genre: F/M, Masturbation, Sex, Touch-Starved, Vibrators
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:06:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24096301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frankenbolt/pseuds/frankenbolt
Summary: Lizzie has lived her whole life deprived of touch and sweetness in intimacy. It's high time she takes matters into her own hands.
Relationships: Elizabeth "Lizzie" Cronin/Fred
Comments: 15
Kudos: 46





	Sweetness

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in a while. I'd opened my drive to see this was the last thing I'd written, and I really liked it. I think this was meant to be a one shot but it's unfinished. If I get a nice enough response, I'll finish it. 
> 
> ...and Lizzie will finally get to finish. >u>

Elizabeth Cronin was not unfamiliar with the concept of sweetness in intimacy.

As a teenager, alone in her far too pink and floral bedroom she’d furiously contemplated the idea. Huddled under sheets and biting her lip so as to not alert Mother to her night time activities, Lizzie had thumbed through a single well worn copy of a dime store romance novel. At first it had been little more than idle curiosity. Her high school health class had explained away the basics (although forging Mother’s signature on the consent form had been far more thrilling than the actual content of the lesson).

So she’d smuggled the cheap novel home in a bundle of other books, gone straight up to her room to “study” and hidden the thing under piles of her old toys. And there it had stayed. Sitting discarded and untouched in her closet for months. Then, finally, once she was certain Mother was asleep, she’d pulled the book out of its hiding place (accidentally knocking one or two old childhood toys aside and jostling them back further into the closet) and scurried back under the covers to see what it was that was exciting her peers so much.

“Blech!” The disgusted noise left her mouth before she had a chance to clamp her mouth shut. Twenty pages in and she had silently giggled her way to the first...ahem, “act”. She supposed the kissing part wasn’t so bad- she’d made her mind up about this already. Kissing must be nice, or else people wouldn’t spend so long doing it in the corridors before class, right?

And she’d given this quite a bit of thought. She’d observed two of her classmates going at it by the bus stop after school one day. People rarely gave Lizzie any sort of thought. Dowdy clothes that might have been cute on a middle schooler, but looked wrong on a senior in high school. Long, dark, straight hair tied up with a ribbon, when her peers were backcombing and feathering...and a shuttered look in her eyes that never seemed to open...no. Lizzie never really got much more than a passing glance...which allowed her to observe.

She wondered how kissing might feel. She’d shuffled to the back of the bus, and unconsciously ran her fingertip along her own bottom lip, barely grazing the only slightly chapped surface. The nerves tingled as she allowed herself to imagine someone touching her there, so softly, to be so close. The touch sizzled lightly long after she let her hand drop back into her lap.

So no. The kissing part of the book was fine. Lizzie also had thought, perhaps being held might be nice too. To have someone casually sling their arm around her waist, to teasingly prod or poke her side...The ache that had left in her chest and the stinging it brought to her eyes easily made the idea seem wonderful. But then she had read the way the book described how lovers held and touched one another. She re-read those parts more fuvertively than others, frustrated how the author could skim over those crucial moments. The lingering caress against uncovered skin, barely there pressure rasping over ribs sweeping in to firmly pressing against sensitive tissue.

That. That awakened an entirely different sort of ache. That first night contemplating how touch seemed to factor into arousal left Lizzie hungry. Or perhaps she’d always been starving? The pain, the physical overwhelming gnawing in her throat that came with the realization of just how much she craved physical contact came precariously balanced with how much just reading about it drove a desire to touch herself.

She didn’t that night. 

She didn’t the next time she dared dig the book out of the closet (again jostling long forgotten toys to the back behind spare blankets) or the next. When she finally found the courage to try it again, she’d found that she still had only been ten pages in. By the time she got to twenty, the heroine and the love interest had only stolen kisses, meaningful glances and secret caresses, and Lizzie found herself with one hand between firmy clamped legs, expecting the “act” that the characters were racing towards would finally drive her to masturbation.

Only to be greeted with the bucket of cold water that comes with realizing there are some things described on the page that lack the subtlety of the real thing. And, Lizzie reflected later wryly, that there ought to be a warning on the cover of these things when it turns out to be written by a man.

When she had met Charles, several years later, she found herself so oversaturated with adoration for the man who noticed her, who saved her from a life of being her Mother’s precious little doll, that she let him take over in the bedroom entirely. And, at first, he had been soft. In hindsight, a little too soft. As Janie would put it later, the man was sloppy in every sense of the word. When Lizzie had described the experience to her, Janie had looked at her with so much pity.

“Honey, did he ever actually make you see stars?”

Lizzie had worried her lip between her teeth and thought about it. “I think...I was more worried about...you know. Pleasing him? To care about what I wanted…”

“That piece of shit.” Janie signaled the waiter and waved down a cheque. “Get your bag.”

“Why?”

“We’re getting you a vibrator.”

Which is how Elizabeth Cronin found herself musing about sweetness in intimacy at five pm on a Saturday afternoon, trudging up the stairs to her new tiny apartment with a discreet brown paper bag wedged firmly in her purse.

She hadn’t thought much to her own pleasure in years. She set her purse down and eyed the lone packing box wedged under her window. She and Mickey had “broken” into her mother’s house the month before and taken some of the things she’d left behind. Things she’d needed that her Mother had seen fit to take when Lizzie had had her little...well. Fred episode.

Gingerly Lizzie opened the box and dug around for a moment before pulling out, red faced, a familiar and even more worn-out book. Shoving the box away and grabbing the paper bag from her purse, she slammed her bedroom door shut, diving under the covers like she wasn’t a twenty eight year old woman and once more a teenager, in her haste, knocking Fred’s jack in the box from the night stand.

One frustrating and unsatisfying hour later, Lizzie had peeled back the covers in a huff, and chucked the book at the opposite wall. Her face flushed and her hair sticking upwards from the static of the sheets, she nearly growled at the offending book now laying face down on the ground having completely missed the waste paper basket.

“What’s the point?! Useless, stupid, unbelievable piece of GARBAGE!”

A long absent, disjointed chiming sounded and before she had a chance to whip her head around, a slightly nasal voice drawled-

“Well of course it is, it’s a bloody stupid girly kissy book!” 

Floating above her side table, like he hadn’t ever really been gone, was Drop Dead Fred. His pointed features scowling at the offending book laying across the room like it had personally insulted him. 

Lizzie pulled her sheets up under her chin, her eyes wide. “Why are you here?! I thought you were Natalie’s new best friend!”

Fred scoffed and rolled his shoulders, dismissively folding his legs over one another in mid-air. “Ever since Sticky Mickey got the message you weren’t interested, he’s been a much better Dad.” There was a fair amount of bitterness in his voice at this, but Lizzie was far too aware of her lack of underwear to digest it.

“But you said you were done with me.”

Fred arched an eyebrow at this. “No I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Er, NO, I didn’t!” Fred pouted. 

“Did too!”

“Did not!” Fred swooped down from his perch on nothing to land firmly on the bed, between Lizzie’s knees, not caring about her personal space, as usual. “I absolutely ruddy well did NOT!”

“DID TOO!” Lizzie shouted back, right in his face, forgetting about holding the sheets firmly enough now. “You said I “didn’t need” you anymore! You didn’t give me a say in the matter! Which means you were sick of me, right?”

Fred’s mouth moved silently for a moment before baring his teeth. “That’s NOT how it works!” Jumping up again, he landed solidly on the floor and whipped round to gesture at Lizzie as he ranted. “YOU were happy! So my job was considered DONE by the higher ups! Contract up. You get to move on, I get another check mark in my ledger! That doesn’t mean I stopped liking you, Snotface!”

Many thoughts crashed through her brain at this but the childish urge to tease him seemed to win out above all else. “Aw, you like me? How embarrassing for you!”

The blush that arose on the imaginary friend’s face clashed horrifically with his hair. “Yeah, well-- At least I’ve got my knickers on right now!”

Squeaking, Lizzie wrenched the sheets back up under her chin. “WHY ARE YOU HERE?!”

Fred grinned and bounced back onto the bed. “I wanted to see you.”

Slightly muffled through the sheets. “Why?”

“Because you’re playing with toys.” Fred said simply, clicking his fingers and suddenly holding the purple vibrator in his left hand. He started waving it like a wand, the same eerie smile plastered on his face. “Been a bit a of a long time since we last played with toys, hasn’t it, snotface? I’m between jobs. Thought we’d have some playtime.”

Lizzie was certain her face would never return to it’s normal shade. Numbly she reached a hand out to take the vibrator back, only to have it held tauntingly out of reach by her former imaginary friend. Weakly she laughed, hoping to downplay her mortification. “You. You don’t want to play with that, Fred, it’s pretty boring-”

Still holding the offending item out of reach, Fred leaned over her, the same grin plastered over his face, stretching wider with every failed attempt to reclaim her property. “You probably weren’t playing with it right.”

“I think I know how to play with it, thank you very much.” Lizzie snapped. “Read the instructions and everything.”

“Oh yeah? You sure about that?”

“Yes! Now give it back!”

“Not until you show me how you were playing with it!”

**Author's Note:**

> Ooooo cliff hanger!  
> Let me know if you want me to finish this!


End file.
